Various abnormalities of body's bodily systems, including the neurological system, can cause severe health risks to patients afflicted by them. For example, in connection with a neurological system, abnormalities such as brain and spinal tumors, cysts, lesions, or neural hematomas can lead to deterioration in motor skills, nausea or vomiting, memory or communication problems, behavioral changes, headaches, or seizures. In certain cases, resection of abnormal tissue masses is required. However, given the various complexity and importance of various bodily functions where the abnormality may be found, such procedures may be extremely delicate and must be executed with great precision and care.
Various tissue removal systems are known or have been proposed for excising abnormal tissue from healthy tissue. However, many known tissue cutting devices suffer from an inability to precisely and atraumatically remove neurological tissue without causing damage to the tissue to be removed, as well as to the surrounding tissues which tissues to be removed are connected or attached to. Indeed, many prior art devices simply provide for a ripping or tearing action that removes diseased tissue away from the patient. Further, some prior art devices also do not provide for successive excision of tissue samples without removal of each tissue sample between each resection cycle.
Additionally, various tissue removal systems use ablative, disruptive or thermal energy, or a combination of these, which cause damage to the excised tissues, as well as the substrate and collateral tissue healthy tissues. Accordingly, these tissue removal mechanisms are not suitable for use when the integrity and viability of the tissue is desired to be maintained for subsequent use for the formulation of personalized medicine regimens. Nor do they allow for the capture and preservation of the resected tissue within a sterile environment. Additionally, the ablative energy that these devices generate also effects the collateral tissue, such as the substrate from which the tumor has been resected which causes the substrate to be damaged and less or even non-effective as a “receptor bed” for subsequent in-situ personalized medicine regimens.
Once diseased tissue is removed, traditionally patients are treated with a “one-size” fits all approach which typically includes a generic and heavy chemotherapy protocol regimen which is delivered to the entire body and designed to provide a balance between enough poison to kill the cancerous tissue without killing all of the healthy tissue. High doses and multiple exposures to radiation are also typically used and delivered by products such as the Gamma Knife and Cyber Knife. However, such invasive treatment regimens are often nothing more than a series of “experiments” on the patient in an effort to find an effective treatment plan. Accordingly the patient must be monitored to ascertain the effectiveness of the generic therapeutic regimen and continuous modification and tweaking of the treatment regime is performed based upon the positive or negative results of each of the previous successes or failures while attempting to balance the sparing of healthy tissues and poisoning effect of the treatment process on the whole patient. Such a treatment regime effectively results in the patient being a guinea pig until an effective treatment regime is achieved to manage the disease or in most cases the patient dies from the disease. Unfortunately, in the case of brain cancers, the patient often succumbs to the disease before an effective treatment regime is achieved. Regardless of these heroic clinical efforts that are very biologically caustic to the patient, rarely are any of the current treatment paradigms curative. In fact, since patients diagnosed with brain cancers often do not typically live beyond 9-14 months after initial diagnosis of the disease, long term clinical implications of whole body chemo or target directed radiation therapy are unknown in these patients and may be detrimental if the patient lived long enough for the true impact to be understood.
However, currently evolving treatment protocols for certain diseases calls for patient specific targeted therapies, i.e., personalized medicine. Several forms of personalized medicine utilize diseased tissue from the patient, i.e., excised tissue, to obtain information about the general disease type, as well as the specific genetic and molecular make-up of the patient's specific disease. From this information, a targeted or personalized oncological treatment regime may be developed that requires the use of the patient's own tissue, which is cultured and used to create a patient specific “cocktail” which may then be delivered back into the patient as a tailored specific therapy regime for that patient.
For effective treatment protocols to be developed, the tissue resected from the patient must be removed, collected and transported in a way that does not compromise the biological integrity or efficacy of the tissue so that it may be not only analyzed by pathology but so further oncological processing may be performed on the tissue so that a patient specific therapeutic cocktail may be created. Traditionally, pathologists only receive limited quality tissue samples and/or limited amounts of tissue due to tissue being damaged during the removal process, or that only a small amount of tissue was able to be retrieved. Tissues for pathological evaluation usage are not required to be maintained in a sterile or aseptic format once removed from within a sterile field, nor was biological integrity or efficacy required. The only requirements were that the tissue not be crushed beyond recognition and not dehydrated. However, for certain types of personalized medicines to be effectively created, there must be sufficient tissue harvested from the tumor and available to an oncological lab (vs. a pathology lab), it must be biologically active and intact, while maintained in a sterile or aseptic environment so that it is not contaminated by foreign matter or biological elements such as bacteria, fungus, etc. This uncompromised environment allows for the effective subsequent culturing of tissue thus allowing the creation of a specific patient therapeutic regimen that enables the creation of personalized medicine therapies. More specifically, there must be an adequate volume of tissue harvested from the tumor, maintained in a sterile or aseptic environment that allows for the resected tissue to be divided for further use as tissue that may be effectively cultured. In some cases it is preferable that the resected tissue be presented to pathology or for oncological processing in predefined consistent sized samples. This offers the opportunity for less manual handling at the point of lab processing of the tissue and therefore less inadvertent physical to the tissue architecture damage which further impacts the true yield of tissue available for pathological or oncological use. Another benefit is that it provides pathology more discreet units for evaluation rather than an en-bloc presentation to pathology (where the en-bloc tissue may only be divided up a few times) of tissue thereby enabling a more complete evaluation of more samples which may produce a more effective evaluation from more of the tumor material. In the case of oncological processing for the creation of patient specific chemotherapy, the tissue samples are first analyzed by pathological means for the determination of specific types of tumor information. Once determined, the tissue, which has been maintained in a sterile or aseptic environment, is then plated for culturing and a variety of different “chemical cocktails” of varying degrees of intensity and composition may be applied to determine which “cocktail” provides the most effective “kill” to the cancer and the least amount of damage to healthy tissue. This procedure is typically referred to as “targeted chemotherapy.” An example of the screening of such candidate therapeutic or chemotherapeutic agents for efficacy as to a specific patient is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,678,552, which is assigned to Precision Therapeutics, Inc. (Pittsburgh, Pa.), the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Another emerging therapy that has been developed is immunotherapy treatments. Immunotherapy treatments utilize the immune system of the patient to fight disease. Generally, such treatments involve harvesting antigen presenting tissue and/or cells from the patient and incubating the tissue/cells containing the antigen of the specific diseased being targeted. The antigen presenting cells swallow up the disease antigen and present the antigen on its surface. The antigen presenting cells are then placed in-situ back into the patient to boost and/or function to train the body's own T-cells to attack any cells that display the disease antigen. Additionally, there are other forms of treatment regimes that use the patient's own tumor cells and tissues, which have been cultured to create specific cocktails to be delivered in-situ which are viral based vectors. An example of one company employing such a technique is Tocagen, Inc. (San Diego, Calif.).
The current challenge for prior art tissue cutting devices is the ability to achieve a safe and effective Gross Total Resection (GTR) or near GTR, to provide the lab with intact segments (biopsy quality tissue, not just cells or macerated tissue) of patient's tissue with little to no crush artifact. Consistency in the “bite” size of the resected tissue is also a challenge. Same or near same sized dimensionally resected tissue bites would minimize post processing handling for oncological use and culturing. A slurry of cells or macerated tissue is not very useful for pathology and unacceptable for an effective oncologically based treatment protocol when tissue culturing is required, current resection techniques and devices do not effectively deliver what is required.
The tissue resected by the surgeon and analyzed by the pathologist is the source of crucial information and that same tissue is used to create from the patient's own tissues the appropriately effective treatment protocol to be used. Indeed, the surgically resected tissue possesses the molecular information needed to define the specific molecular characteristics of the patient's tumor, the specific therapies to which the tumor would be expected to respond, and even the specific risks of adverse reactions to given therapies predicted by the patient's genetic make-up.
However, safeguarding the molecular integrity and efficacy of the resected tissue while in the operating room and during transport to the laboratory, is currently a challenge. Tissue samples react to physiological stress. For example, once successfully resected, the specimen may spend varying amounts of time in a biologically unfriendly environment such as at room temperature in the surgical suite and/or holding unit, allowed to be exposed to atmosphere, allowed to dry out, placed in a non-sterile/non-aseptic environment , etc. before being delivered to the laboratory. Temperature may alter the molecular composition and quality of the tissue samples. Similarly, other physiological stress may also detrimentally impact the tissue samples, such as perfusion and oxygenation.
Immunotherapy treatments require biologically active tissue that are tissue blocks, not just individual cells. In fact, it is known that individual cells from diseased tissue respond and act biologically differently than do “colonies” (blocks) of tissue when subjected or exposed to therapeutic agents. Thus tissue must be resected without crush artifact, ablative destruction of the cell walls or thermal damage, such as char, for the benefit of pathological evaluation and for use in personalized medicine oncological therapies. Additionally, it is not just the viability of the resected tissue that must be considered but also the substrate from which the resected tissue has been harvested that also must be respected and not damaged so that it may act as an effective receptor bed for personalized medicine therapeutic regimens that require in-situ placement of the regimen. Moreover, these treatment regimens also require a minimum volume of tissue for effective use. Finally, the tissue that is resected, collected, transported, must be preserved in an aseptic or preferably a sterile environment which precludes dehydration, contamination or compromise so it may remain biologically active and efficacious so that it may be cultured (i.e., living and biologically active tissue that is not compromised with contamination) for additional/advanced pathology based tissue testing and the needs of further processing to accomplish the needs of neuro-oncology and neuro-immunology for targeted therapies such as chemo, viral and other immune therapies for the achievement of personalized medicine.
Thus, a need has arisen for a system that utilizes a tissue cutting device that addresses the foregoing issues, as well as a system that provides for effective transport of resected tissue while minimizing, if not eliminating detrimental stress on the tissue samples.